The simple definition of hyper connectivity is ‘everything is talking’, people to people, people to machine and machine to machine and people to networks and networks to networks. The retail omni market has, along with consumer demands has brought about the realization of a collaborative network framework that supports and encourages hyper connectivity in the retail marketplace. This is extremely important because it reduces the friction of the free flow of data and communications that is required to produce knowledge and reactions to the data to support the network. I see this aspect of network to network communications and especially as it relates to the social networks and relationships to the retail collaborative network as a key to the growth and change in the retail market. This allows and encourages the network to support a living growth and interactions across social networks that in turn will drive change and further disrupt the retail market.
This is where the sense and respond practices and capabilities of the network partners becomes important. This sense and respond capability becomes more important as the hyper connectivity increases to allow the partners to change and align strategies to deliver personalized products and services anytime and anywhere. The partners in this network must develop methods to assess the demands and expectations against the products and services to help to guide the selection and promotion of them. This will allow the partners to continuously and quickly refine and improve the consumer offerings based on the near real time interactions and responses to these actions and interactions. These continuous interactions across partners and networks must be monitored to sense potential change and alert the partners of the change in near real time to allow for reaction. This is where AI comes into play and the amount of data available to analyze and sense change can quickly guide the reactions of the partners to realize and take advantage of network responses and changes.
The retailers and especially large retailers must plug into these networks in order to survive because the speed of change supported by this hyper connectivity will quickly overwhelm these retailers’ current capabilities and practices. These changes have been building and the hyper connectivity capabilities coupled with AI are coming together to push the process to ever increasing speed of reaction and change. These changes in connectivity and the span can depth of the collaborative networks are all very positive changes that will allow the retailers to more quickly and efficiently sense consumer preferences to change and align their services and even personalize product and offerings to consumer purchase anytime and anywhere. These changes, though, can also be very detrimental to the success of the retailers that do not embrace the network and capabilities.
The collaborative network and partners, especially including consumers, will allow the retailers and service providers to quickly assess new products and services to align with consumer preferences and this will allow the the retailers to more effectively and efficiently forecast demand. The result of these improved demand forecasts the demands and expectations of the entire supply chain from manufacturer to delivery to the retailer and consumer will also change dramatically.
This network supporting and feeding the hyper connectivity is by its very nature and open and collaborative network that focuses on demands and capabilities that bring benefits to all partners, which are all very good things. The challenge for many of the large retailers is the change in culture and practices, including much of the back office activities. These large retailers have always been challenged to quickly change and the velocity of change is continuously increasing. These retailers must embrace first the collaborative network and then the tools and culture that will allow them to sense and respond to consumer and network demands and capabilities.
No comments:
Post a Comment